Link To It And Move In

Suppose you own a corner bookstore and have landed 50 copies of
Moby Dick at 10 cents a copy. Say you would like
to sell them at the cut-rate price of, say, $1.00 a copy. You maintain
a small retail web site at
invisiblebookstore.com.
The site allows a consumer to purchase a book. Now,
as a bookseller, you know the book market, and know where consumers go
to in order to purchase books on line. Let's say you know there are a
lot of buyers who go to
wellknownbookstore.com.
Further, assume you too have visited
wellknownbookstore.com's
web site, and have found a public, static web page there specifically
about Moby Dick (represented by the blue box in
Figure 2.4). In so far as a user can order
Moby Dick from the web page, it serves as
a point-of-sale page for Moby Dick wares at
wellknownbookstore.com.

Figure 2.4. Path To Moby Dick Page At
wellknownbookstore.com

You calculate that visitors to this last page
http://www.wellknownBookstore.com/fiction/classics/MobyDick.html
are interested in Moby Dick, and some
percentage of them use link aware tools that can make link-topological
queries. So you author a page containing a link to this last page
and register it with Ila. The red box in Figure 2.5
represents your newly created web page.

Now, if a user visits the blue page, they can use Ila to see your
red page and compare what you
(invisiblebookstore.com) have to
offer versus what
wellknownbookstore.com has.

More realistically (if you suspend your disbelief just a while longer),
you will find you are not the only player in this
Moby Dick space. If a number of other
booksellers employ the same linking strategy, then we will have
a tiny marketplace where buyers and sellers of Moby Dick
wares meet.

Figure 2.6. Moby Dick Marketplace

The white boxes in Figure 2.6 denote other
booksellers' Moby Dick pages, and the blue page
is just a consensual landmark, a reference point, in this web locality.

We can continue tangentially along this dreamscape:

The Booksellers' Guild crafts a simple XML standard to
describe books for sale, and instead of simply linking HTML documents
to the consensual hub, the sellers standardize on the new format.
Now when users search the Moby Dick web locality,
client-side software agents parse the backlinked XML content and rank the
Moby Dick wares according to the criteria specified
by the end-user. Moreover, the user is free to pick from a plethora of
linked software agents. What has emerged is a location-transparent,
distributed, organic, evolutionary micro marketplace.
It's a town square. It's a bustling, chaotic bazaar with cheap real estate.
All transactions are end-to-end; no property managers,
no intermediators; no rules except consensual ones.

While the above might conjure a chaotic universe of interlinked
content and executable code, the situation is not as bad as it seems.
Quite the contrary. Link awareness is what you make of it.
Every data structure ever devised, after all, is a subset of some
connectivity graph. Every tree, every relational schema,
is representable with a graph, a web topology.